Yesterday, The Silicon Valley Insider reported according the Nielsen 60% of Twitter users quit after the first month. While over half of Twitter users fall off after a month, social networking services such as Facebook and MySpace have much strong retention rates.

It’s worth noting here that Nielsen is likely overstating the churn because it is only measuring visits to the Twitter.com URL. The majority of Twitter use happens away from the site, on mobile phones and apps like Tweetdeck, and it’s theoretically possible to never visit Twitter.com after you sign up.

Recently, there has been some major buzz about a trend known as augmented reality (AR). While this trend is more well known in the academic and marketing worlds, I think it is about to hit mainstream, especially from a consumer basis.

Augmented reality is explained as “add[ing] information and meaning to a real object or place. Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality does not create a simulated reality. Instead, it takes a real object or space and uses technologies to add contextual data to deepen students’ (or in our case consumers’) understanding of it.” In the past, the primary uses of augmented reality devices were academic, research, military, architecture and science based.

Mars’ Skittles has forgone a traditional website, and instead has created a seamless social media hub. If you go to the official Skittles website at www.skittles.com, the user is immediately directed to the Skittles fan page on Facebook.

Since its inception, there have been many implementations of Facebook Connect, most notably CNN’s use of it to create a live, co-viewing experience for the inauguration. The implementations to this point have been used to socialize non-social websites, create co-viewing experiences and to increase value of a website by importing a users social network. I have not seen Facebook Connect used as a way to create hyper-targeted ads on those third-party websites utilizing Facebook Connect data portability.